


Almost Paradise

by mldrgrl



Series: Adventures of The Lady Detective and The Writer [25]
Category: Californication, The Fall (TV 2013)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Vacation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-23 05:43:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10713396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mldrgrl/pseuds/mldrgrl
Summary: Hanella in Bora Bora





	Almost Paradise

It's not often that he has the opportunity to watch her sleep.  Even when it comes along, it's fleeting, like she can sense his eyes on her and she always wakes before he's had a chance to get his fill.  Maybe it's something about the ocean air or the sound of the tide or the warmth of the sun that keeps her in slumber long enough for him to study her.

 

She hasn’t done anything to her hair in the whole eight days they've been in Bora Bora.  It takes on a natural wave he's never seen before, fluffy and frizzy in a way that's both alarming and endearing.  She hasn't worn any make-up either, resulting in a startling explosion of freckles across her nose and cheeks and forehead.  She's sun-kissed red everywhere in between, radiant and glowing.

 

In her sleep, she takes a deep breath and nuzzles his chest just a little.  He shifts one leg over the side of the hammock they’re lying in and gives a gentle push so that it sways from side to side.  He skims his hand up and over her arm to cup her shoulder.  He would like for her to stay asleep; to just stay tucked against him with her bare breasts pressed to his chest and side, her leg bent over his thighs while the purple sarong that’s wrapped around her hips exposes enough of the left cheek of her ass to be enticing, yet still mysterious.  He knows she’s wearing a royal blue pair of bikini bottoms, but right now all he can see is skin.

 

The urge to touch her is strong, but he resists.  Any other time he wouldn’t hesitate to reach down and brush the sarong aside so he could dip his hand inside her swimsuit and coax her awake with determined fingers.  He knows, though, that this is their last day here and every bit of peace and relaxation she can get she should have.  He’s not going to be the one to disturb her.  Besides, they’ve had more than enough sex in the last week to possibly break records.  Certainly more than the honeymooners in the next closest villa who’ve spent more time snorkeling in the lagoon or walking on the beach than Hank would consider normal for honeymooners.

 

Bora Bora wasn’t really his first choice for a vacation, but it was important to him to find somewhere that was off the grid.  Somewhere neither of them would be tempted to work.  Somewhere they didn’t know anyone.  Somewhere private and safe and nothing like their everyday life.  She needed an escape and he wanted to find one for her.

 

He’d called Charlie - not for advice, but to ask him if the offer was still on the table from a travel magazine that had been pestering his agent to ask for a piece they could include in one of their issues to entice readers into a destination vacation.  He would whore himself out with ten thousand words of story for an almost entirely comped vacation in return.  Bora Bora, they said, and so that’s where he took her.

 

She’d argued against it at first, as he knew she would.  She wouldn’t be Stella without putting up a fight, but he knew that  _ she _ knew, deep down, that she needed a break.  Hell, he needed one too.  The black cloud that had been following her for the last few weeks affected him as well.

 

It all started one evening when he came home from the pub he’d frequently used as an office space to write in and found her at the kitchen island with a nearly empty bottle of wine.  She had a haunted look on her face and when he’d asked her what was wrong she stared at him like she didn’t understand what he was asking.  Normally, an icy silence like that would’ve pissed him off, but this one scared him.  He wasn’t sure what he’d done to fuck up so badly, but it was obviously something.

 

He was about to apologize for whatever the fuck he’d done, but she finally opened her mouth and asked him if he remembered the Spector case she’d worked on three years earlier.  He wasn’t likely to forget about the man who’d used her face as a punching bag and the shock he contained at seeing her after so long.  Yes, he remembered the Spector case.

 

Apparently, there’d been a young girl badly affected by her infatuation with Spector.  So enamored was she, that it landed her in juvenile detention and eventually an institution.  Stella had found out that afternoon that Katie had taken her own life earlier in the week, not that she’d kept track of her, but word had somehow reached her when an Irish newspaper reported on the suicide and linked it back to the Spector case.

 

She was angry.  Angry at the loss, angry at Katie, angry at herself, angry at Spector, angry at the press, angry at the system, angry angry angry.  She was stoic with her anger, expressing it with scratches down his back, bites to his shoulder, and demands to be fucked harder when he tried to make love to her, both wanting pain and to be the cause of it.  The aggression in her became more and more subdued after a few weeks and eventually she slipped into a melancholy that lingered far too long.

 

It was the sadness that worried him.  He’d never known her to be passive about anything, but suddenly, she was passive about a lot of things - and even though those things were mostly simple, like what to do for dinner or what movie to watch on TV, but it was so unlike her to be lacking in opinions and just not to care.  The only thing she seemed passionate about was that nothing was wrong.

 

Hank was certainly not an idiot.  He knew problems weren’t solved by running from them, but he began to feel like Stella was using her work and their life as an excuse not to face the issues.  He knew there were days that she stayed at work longer than she needed to and he also knew she wasn’t sleeping very well.  She was having nightmares that she didn’t want to talk about and though she wasn’t pushing him away...yet...she wasn’t letting him in either.

 

Essentially, he’d gotten what he’d hoped for out of this vacation.  It took a few days to get her to relax, but she’d gotten there.  At night, she slept, nightmare-free and without interruption.  And, it seemed, she wanted to make up for lost time in other areas.  He couldn’t come within ten feet from her without turning her on somehow.  It put his stamina to the test, but he wasn’t complaining.  Also, in light of the privacy the villa afforded them, she started sunbathing and walking around topless, which he found thrilling.  

 

His favorite feature of their villa, by far, was the glass floor in the middle with a view of the water below.  At night, they were able to illuminate it from under the hut and the blue-green water glowed brilliantly.  Tiny schools of fish darted by and an occasional sea turtle.  On their third night there, the sea life got an eyeful of his bare ass when Stella pushed him down against the glass and fucked him senseless.

 

Stella moves and stretches in her sleep and Hank stops rocking the hammock for a moment to look down at her and determine if she’s waking from her nap.  Her eyes open and she rubs her thigh against his groin a little.

 

“Good afternoon to you too,” Hank says, reaching down to curl his fingers at the back of her knee.

 

She hums a little in response and rubs her face against his shoulder.  She’d told him on the first day they were there that whatever suntan lotion he’d put on was driving her wild and since then, she’d been habitually smelling him whenever they were close.  Apparently she was horny for Hawaiian Tropic.

 

“What should we do today?” Hank asks.  “Shark diving?  Windsurfing?  Jetski?”

 

“What haven’t we tried off the room service menu yet?”

 

“Short of eating the menu itself, I think we’re out of new options there.  We can go out to that cocktail bar down the beach, but then you’d probably have to put a shirt on.”  He sighs dramatically and slides his hand under her chest to take a handful of her breast.  “There really should be a law against shirts.  That’s the first thing I’m doing when we get home is petitioning parliament for an all topless all the time law.”

 

“London is too cold for that.”

 

“Even better.”

 

Stella chuckles and lifts herself up so she’s hovering above him and he has to push his foot to the floor to keep the hammock from swaying erratically from the movement.  He looks down her chest at her swaying breasts and stills them with both hands.

 

“Actually,” he says.  “I just want a law that requires  _ you _ to be all topless all the time.”

 

“You can draft me a proposal and I’ll give it some consideration.”

 

He squeezes her breasts, pushes them up slightly and circles his thumbs around her areolas.  “There’s not much to it,” he says.  “It’s just you, no bra, no shirt, whenever you’re in my presence in the house.”

 

“What do I get in return?”

 

“Full and complete ownership of my cock from now until eternity.”

 

“I believe I already have that.”  She drops her hips and rubs herself against the growing bulge in his swim trunks.  “What else?”

 

“What else do you want?”

 

She pauses blinks slowly as she stares down at him.  He takes his hands away from her breasts to push her hair back and away from her face.  She closes her eyes and tilts her head into one of his hands for a moment and then lowers herself back down on top of his chest and he wraps his arms over her.

 

“I don’t want to leave,” she says.

 

“Let’s just stay here then,” he answers.  “You can become a cocktail waitress and I’ll find work as a cabana boy.”

 

She sighs and presses her mouth to his chest, just above his right nipple.  She flattens her tongue against his skin for a moment and then turns to settle her cheek against him again.

 

“I think you need to talk to someone, Stella,” he says. 

 

“I know,” she answers.

 

It surprises him that she admits it.  Stuns him into silence, actually.  He strokes her hair and watches the water ripple towards their little hut.  Stella picks her head up again and moves up to kiss him.  He tastes the remnants of the pineapple chapstick she smoothed across her lips before they went out to laze in the hammock.  She rubs herself against him again and he reaches for her hips to stop her.  They already tried fucking in the hammock once and it didn’t work out so well.  No traction and no balance.

 

“Are you really asking me to stop?” she says.

 

“I’m just saying one of the lounge chairs might be better.”

 

“I’m not afraid of a little challenge.”

 

“I know you’re not.”

 

They’re not so frantic this time and that makes all the difference.  Hank shimmies his trunks off his hips and then kicks them off his legs while Stella slips out of her bikini bottoms.  The sarong is still wrapped around her hips and the fringe at the end tickles his thighs as she slides her body down and against his.  The hammock twists and rocks and all he has to keep them steady under the threat of displacement is his one foot on the ground.

 

“You’re gonna have to drive this ship,” he tells her.  “Otherwise we’re ending up ass over elbow on the deck.”

 

Stella sighs as Hank sinks into her.  He rubs her thighs and grits his teeth against the urge to move.  God, he wants to move so badly.  Especially when he feels her clench around him, pulling him deeper with practiced skill.  She barely has to move and she doesn’t make a sound, which isn’t fair.  She stays hovering over him, staring down at his face with half of her bottom lip caught between her teeth in concentration.  Clench and release.  Clench and release.  He breaks into a sweat and pulls at her thighs, but the hammock tips at the slightest change in weight distribution and he knows it’s too precarious of a situation.

 

Her eyelids flutter and those tiny muscles that pull at him seem to twitch and flutter as well.  She pants above him and licks her mouth.  This is either some kind of tantric bullshit or she’s trying to kill me, he thinks.  The challenge of not moving is almost unbearable.  He tries shifting his hips a little and she circles hers in response.  He needs friction.

 

Fuck it, he thinks, and tips the hammock to the side.  He holds on to her to break the fall, cupping the back of her head with one hand and her tailbone with the other.  His elbows hit the deck and he knows they’ll bruise, but better him than her.  She has her legs wrapped around him before he even raises his hips to slam into her.

 

“What took you so long?” she breathes.  

 

The hammock twists and sways above them, casting moving shadows across her shoulders.  The deck is hot under his forearms and he hopes it isn’t burning her back, but she’s not complaining.  She’s moaning and gasping, actually, and digging her fingers into his ass.

 

I fucking love Bora Bora, he thinks, as he releases into her.  He feels her thighs trembling against his hips, but she doesn’t let go, so he holds himself up on his arms and breathes roughly against her neck.  Eventually, he becomes aware of everything outside of himself.  The muted sound of gentle waves, the distant cry of a bird, the smell of salt, the light breeze cooling the sweat on his back.

 

Hank shifts his body to move off of Stella, but she wraps her arms across his shoulders and keeps him where he is.  He sinks back down, kissing her face.  Sweat trickles down her temples and her neck.  Her hair fans out wildly beneath her.

 

“Thank you for bringing me here,” she says.

 

“My pleasure.  Literally, and figuratively.”

 

“I know that I’ve been difficult and you’ve been concerned.  I’m…”

 

Hank raises his head and looks down at her.  “Don’t,” he says.

 

“Don’t what?”

 

“I don’t know.  Apologize, or say it’s fine, or act like I was just doing myself a favor.”

 

“Things haven’t been easy for you.”

 

“For me?”  He takes Stella’s head between his hands, thumbs brushing her temples.  “Stella, if you’re not okay, I’m not okay.  If something is difficult for you, it’s difficult for us.  It’s not about me or you, it’s about  _ us _ .”

 

“I’m still adjusting to that school of thought.”

 

“I’m not going anywhere.”

 

“Sometimes I believe I’m still adjusting to that as well.”

 

“Promise me when we get home you’ll talk to someone about that girl.  It doesn’t have to be me, but it has to be someone.”

 

“We’ve a psychologist on staff.  I’ll make an appointment.”

 

“Good.”

 

Stella reaches up and pulls his face down to kiss him.  It isn’t a passionate kiss, just one that lingers.  She frames his ears and keeps her mouth against his, eyes closed.  He’s the first to break away and he moves down to kiss her neck.

 

“Would you consider topless Tuesdays?” he asks, running his face down her chest and nuzzling her left breast.

 

“Yes, I’ll give it some consideration.”

 

“Really?”   


 

“Plead your case when we get home.  Right now I’m in need of some room service.”

 

“Cabana boy Moody at your service.”  He rolls away from her to move out from under the hammock and get up.

 

Stella stretches and he takes a moment to enjoy the view of her wild hair, her arms above her head, her naked breasts, the purple sarong still loose at her hips so that the rest of her nudity remains tantalizingly hidden.  He considers regularly whoring himself out to the travel magazine for more moments like this.

 

The End

 


End file.
